Desktop decorating. (Design Notes).

Finding a really useful Web site among the thousands that are not calls for a celebration. This month, with the aid of partial funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) in Boston launches an on-line catalogue of its enormous wallpaper collection--some nine thousand objects.

In 1911 the founder of SPNEA, William Sumner Appleton, acquired thirty-nine wallpaper samples, and ever since the curators have been on the watch for examples not represented in the collection. Wallpapers decorated more than walls in earlier times, so examples in the collection were found lining trunks, covering pamphlets and bandboxes, and decorating fireboards.

The earliest documented paper in the collection embellished the walls of a New England house in 1737. Among other highlights are a group of the first wallpapers manufactured in Boston and two sequences of twenty layers of wallpaper applied to the walls of a small properly in the North End of Boston over a period of more than 150 years.

SPNEN's collection also includes wallpapers made in distant countries that were exported to the United States not long after they were made: Chinese rice papers with hand-painted decoration made for the American market, French scenic papers of the nineteenth century, the first wallpaper made to the designs of William Morris in 1862, and graphically ...